Even when you fail to plan, your plan can still fail you

I love to take pictures. It doesn't surprise me that when the hard drive on my personal computer was near the end of its life, I did what most procrastinating reactionaries do and try to back them up before the hard drive goes completely kaput. It doesn't really surprise me that I had over 11,000 digital photos to pull off of there. I am the father of a beautiful 22-month old girl and I love to travel. 8,000 of those photos are probably of my little girl.

A few weeks ago, my wife and daughter packed up and went on a weekend trip to Disneyland and Los Angeles. This post isn't about that trip, sorry. You'll have to wait for the book. Call it what you will, maybe a case of sibling envy or something as simple as technophilia, but last summer, my wife and I shelled out big bucks to purchase a DSLR camera that neither of us know how to work to its full advantage. Looking to take advantage of a package deal, we shelled out more money to get an extra lens, a couple filters, 2 instructional DVDs and a bag to carry all this. Later, we spent even more money on an external flash. Now, aside from looking like a tourist everywhere I go, I look like a damn paparazzo. Lugging around a camera such as this, not to mention all its accessories, can get pretty cumbersome, not to mention heavy.

In an effort ease some travel woes, I went on the e-commerce juggernaut known as Amazon and ordered a camera holster. Not quite as big as a bag, but big enough. I also saw that flash memory is really cheap know, and I figured I'd be taking a lot of pictures, so I splurged and bought a 4GB SDHC card to replace my measly 1GB card I have in there now. For the record, I wound up taking close to 500 pictures the whole weekend. The bag, excuse me, holster was $31.95 and the memory card $12.95. I told you that it was cheap. Heck, I remember when I bought my first digital camera the summer of '02. The largest you could go was 128MB and that cost me almost $100. Anyway, the total was $44.90.

I decided to have it shipped to my in-laws because 1) if it needed a signature when it arrived during the day, the chances of someone being home are far greater than at my place and 2) if the delivery guy would be careless enough to put it on my porch for the world to see, who's to say someone couldn't walk off with it. Granted, I get a lot of my paranoia from my parents, but recently we came home to discover that one of our patio chairs we had moved to our front "stoop" recently disappeared. Hoodlums, no doubt. All the tweakers have moved (I hope).

Back to the story at hand. I ordered this parcel a week before we were to leave for our trip. I did not spring for the extra shipping because a lot of the recent feedback was to the tune of "fast shipping", "got earlier than expected" and the like. Even if it didn't come until we were already on vacation, that's fine. It wasn't absolutely vital to have, it'd just be a convenience.

Well, to make a long story slightly shorter, it never arrived. Delivered by the US Postal Service, documentation states that it was not delivered because the address was not valid. It was valid. I don't know who to blame. The post office, Amazon, or the storefront in Amazon. When such an event occurs, the parcel gets shipped back to the sender in New York and per there policy, refunds the money. 2 weeks after this is set to occur, it finally happens.

My want for such items has not waned in the recent weeks, but in a way this experience was sort of serendipitous. While pining away for my package in the mail, I saw that there was a bigger and better holster for only a few dollars more. It's by the same brand, just a step up. Maybe I'll get that one instead. The holster was $39.95 and the memory card $9.95. The total was $49.90. The holster was a surprisingly $8 more expensive, but surprisingly, the exact same memory card was $3 cheaper only make the order $5 more.

Aside from not completing the ultimate task of actually placing the order in my hands, the storefront I purchased it from did everything right, so I decided to put my letter-writing pen down and give them another shot. We'll see if and when it gets here.